A Comprehensive History of the many Peoples and Events of the Continent of the Gatelands
I give many thanks to you reader for purchasing and choosing to use this work as a guide to your travels amongst these fair lands. Below is detailed a short but informative history on each of the races located in the Gatelands. ~ Esan Tabernacle, 278 years after the Fall. Half-Gnomish Historian, Scholar, & Cartographer. The fair Elves were the first race to grace these lands, where they began as a simple nature loving species. They had many peaceful years before any of the subsequent events occurred, long enough for each race of the Elves to happily spread over a third of the continent each. Drow claimed the northeast, the wood elves the northwest, and the high elves with the south. It is said that after some 2000 years after the coming of the elves, the Dwarves appeared in the northeast, crawling out of the stone and ground which they so love. With both the Dwarves and Drow competing for these lands, hostilities grew between them, hostilities that have yet to heal between all Elfkind and the Dwarves. The Dwarves did slowly however begin to force the Drow out of their lands. After just short of a hundred years of war and competition the Dwarves now owned almost half of the continent, and still had force to continue. The Elves, starting to feel the pressure after initially underestimating their foe, came together into an alliance, and pooled their resources and knowledge construct the Far Gate, for which these lands are named after. The opening of the far gate had many effects on this world, although less so than it destruction much more recently. The new wealth of magic energy and control over it felt by the Elves from the feywild helped the Elves end the war and bring peace yet again to the Gatelands. This, along with the peace treaties between each party, forced the Dwarves to recede into their mountain valley, where they are still today. The Elves then constructed a new capital city for their lands, which would house all races of Elves and unite them as one people, built around the Far Gate, keeping their city verdant and prosperous. It is in this time just before peace that we hear talk of the mythical giant lizards, Dragons. They had come from other unknown lands, possibly fleeing from their own wars, or for other unknown reasons. Six kinds of dragon travelled here: Gold, Brass, Bronze, Copper, Silver, and the oceanic Dragon Turtles. However, seeing the destruction wrought on the mainland by its native peoples, they decide to pool their natural draconic magical essence, and create the dragon archipelago, Seen in the southeast below the Dwarven homelands, with one island for each of the metallic dragons. However the dragons soon saw that they needed a peoples to serve them, and protect and work their lands, so they once again combined their magics to create a draconic peoples for each kind of dragon. However, a young copper Dragon with green spots, Cadeth the trickster, twisted some of each of the other dragon’s people and offspring, creating the pseudodragons, and pseudodragonborn. Roughly 500 years later is the first talk of the Great Spheres, and shortly after the Elsinki, a race of strange alien lizard-like people in the deserts to the south of the continent. The Spheres were (before they all vanished with the destruction of the Far Gate) a collection of large floating god-like constructs with immense power. These constructs then went about terraforming the southern desert, turning it into a lush homeland for their worshipers, the Elsinki. This lasted until the Fall, when the spheres had disappeared, and the release of energy from the destruction of the Far Gate undid the transformative magic that had been placed on their lands. With this, their lands reverted back to desert, ruining their civilisation. With the main players of the most prevalent races of this world established, is where I must introduce you to the histories of the comparatively younger races. It is at this point in the annals that the histories of the two shorter races of this world begin, but they could not be more different. The gnomes for instance, who are believed to have originated from the feywild itself, fit almost perfectly with the world at this time. This race bridged the dichotomy between the elves and dwarves quite well, as they had the short stature and industrious outlook of the dwarves, but the nature and magic loving side of the elves. Being a generally friendly and amicable race they fit in well with most cultures, however, due to a lack of need have no large strongholds or lands themselves. Their history continues many years later however, with the advent of current magitech inventions. Yet, they were not the only short race to turn up at this time, as it is seen in ancient dwarven literature, that small marauding creatures, which became known as goblins, started showing up in dwarven mines the deeper they dug. From here, largely becoming regarded as pests and criminals by any races that dealt with them. They are shown to have spread from the dwarven tunnels to the surface world, however, they are shown to still prefer to make burrows underground. However, while this race may gain disgust still, it is not extremely uncommon to find the rare goblin amongst other races, especially the gnomes, who find that their companionship, while boisterous, is not unfriendly. They have shown to be quite inventive, albeit it in a way dissimilar to gnomes. With the Far Gate open for so long, the planes we prone to mix with our own, for instance the a few of the Aarakocra, a reality remote and unknown race to most, from the elemental plane of air transitioned to this plane, but have slowly grown into some larger, more notable nomadic groups. While the Aarakocra were once a flighted race, well known amongst any who knew of them as great aerial fliers and combatants, the races time away from the plane of air and its powers have had effects on their form, for they have lost their true flying ability. Their wings are now non-existent, and they can only limited glide with their arms. There is talk of the origin of the Catfolk, but not much is known of their histories, even by them. Near enough to the same time the Aarakocra transitioned to this plane, it is said spirits from the elemental planes came through the Far Gate, and began possessing big cats across the continent. These animals became first sentient, and then more humanoid in form. The Catfolk, as they came to be know, formed two main colonies. The Arctic Catfolk created a colony of ice in the frigid north, practicing control over air and water magics. The Jungle and Savannah Catfolk created another colony in the south near the Elsinki, where they practice fire and earth controlling magics. This theory is mainly agreed with, as the Catfolk have the natural talents to separate the elemental forces of magic, to cast each element separately. There is no direct documentation of when humanity appeared, or of their origins. It is said by many that they just stumble upon settlement that had not been their just a few years before, and while humans are numerous, they have no direct homelands, nor great unity between their groups. While not a magically attuned race, there is a strange magic behind them. They are a very hardy and tenacious race, thriving in almost an environment or conditions, and they have a strange ability to produce viable offspring with many of the other races, which they can often be more affiliated with members of their own race. This has led to many so called ‘Half’ races, like myself, who fit into many of the surrounding cultures, and take naturally to travel and exploration. This natural ability to intermingle with other traits have also made them targets of many extra planar energies and beings. About 100 years after the first appearance of humans, the Tiefling were created when Asmodeus, lord of the nine hells, claimed a selection of the human populous in a blood filled ritual. However, with the Far Gate's destruction, a large amount of fey magic out into the world, and a group of Archfey using this limited time, destroyed and removed the tieflings’ demonic patronage, and replace it with fey energies. With this the tieflings have become very sylvan in nature, with many pilgrimaging to the elvish capital. They weren’t the only race created by the fall though. It is unusual, although not impossible for human parents to sometimes create a child blessed with natural ties to arcane ability. These children known as Illumian, can be distinguished by a collection of arcane sigils that float in a circle around their head. However, no race was effected more than shardminds, as the ‘Fall’ of the Far Gate was their birth. There are estimated to be roughly 400 shardmind in total, due to a strange fact of their physiology where when a shardmind dies its energies travel back to the remnants of the Far Gate, where new shards break off and a new shardmind comes into existence. They were the strangest phenomenon of the Fall, one even the elves couldn’t have predicted. I have been lucky enough to meet one, and I will say their thought patterns are very alien and strange, with a more logical mind than most could handle. However, they are fiercely loyal to their beliefs, and appear to be very attached to making a good first impression as one of the newer and rarer races. Finally though, the newest and rarest race, created by the gnomes themselves, is the automaton. These creations begin to be constructed when a brilliant team of gnomish artificers worked out how to harness the latent leftover energies of the Fall. Much like the shardmind, when these energies are collected in large enough amounts, the combined interactions somehow form consciousness. By limiting the energies to different amounts, recreations of different levels of intelligence can be create, be that a simple beast or a creature as complex and sentient as you and I. This concludes the brief overview of the current history of these lands and its people, which I count myself lucky to be one of.